Chapter 31

I believe that interplanetary travel is now (with the release of atomic energy) a definite possibility.

—Richard Feynman, December 5, 1945

Oppie began the new year with his three divisions established: Hans Bethe’s Patient Power struggling with solar physics; Kitty and Szilard’s Compact Cement wrestling with unconventional ideas; and I.I. Rabi’s Names group desperately trying to find ways to get humans off the planet.

Actually, at Rabi’s suggestion, his division had quickly transitioned from being just “Names” to “New Names,” matching the alliterative appellations for the other two. Although surprisingly few of the emigré scientists who’d worked on the Manhattan Project had done it, changing one’s name when moving to a new land was common, and so there was still a hint of relocation about the code term without its scope being obvious.

But the overall effort—the totality of what they were doing—still lacked a title. Something as nondescript as the Manhattan Project was called for although the obvious, the Princeton Project, would likely draw complaints from the nearby university, should word of it ever go public.

After mulling it over, Oppie decided that the umbrella would be “the Arbor Project.” Most assumed he’d chosen the Latin word for tree in honor of the Institute’s famed woods. Szilard, always alert to obscure symbolism, wondered if it was after “The Arbor,” the final play by the Czech Jewish playwright Hermann Unger; Oppie did not disabuse him. But, in fact, he’d picked the term as a quiet memorial to his beloved Jean Tatlock, who’d been born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and whose thirty-first birthday would have been January 4, 1946, the same day Oppie announced the name.

The Institute really was an excellent headquarters for the Arbor Project. Besides providing pleasant on-site accommodations and the treed neighborhoods of Princeton for those, such as Einstein, who chose not to live on the actual grounds, it was also centrally located for other team members who would visit weekly or monthly while carrying out research at their own facilities. For Rabi, at Columbia, it was a ninety-minute drive. For Groves in Washington, it was a three-hour drive. Feynman, at Cornell, enjoyed the opportunity to barrel along the country roads for four hours with Hans Bethe riding shotgun, and Fermi could fly in easily enough from Chicago. Only von Braun, 2,100 miles away at Fort Bliss, found it arduous to get here.

Now that Frank Aydelotte had fully retired, Oppie had at last taken possession of the spacious office of the Institute’s director, with a lovely view of the woods and a pond. Among its advantages were privacy: no one could barge in without first passing through the secretary’s room. It also was as far away as one could get from Einstein’s office while still being on the first floor of Fuld Hall, meaning another heated discussion shouldn’t rouse the Grand Old Man from his lair.

Today, Rabi, Groves, Feynman, and Fermi were in Oppie’s office, along with Szilard, who had moved into a room at the Nassau Inn, a half-hour walk northeast of the Institute, and Kitty, who was relishing her new role. One might have expected it to be cramped, but the first renovation Oppie had ordered to this room, 107, was the removal of all bookcases so that larger groups could be accommodated with comfortable chairs.

“Before the war,” said Kitty, seated against the long, blank west wall, “there were 2.3 billion people. Of course, it went down some during the war—but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a post-war baby boom.” She’d spent time yesterday researching this in the Princeton University library. “It’s difficult to map a trend, though. There was very steep worldwide population growth between 1650 and 1900; it’s been less rapid since. But, even so, by the time the solar purge hits, by 2028 or 2030, we might well have tripled or quadrupled the current population to—”

“Seven or nine billion,” said Groves, stuffed into a chair by the north-facing window.

Oppie, behind his director’s desk, crossed then uncrossed his legs. He was still getting used to the sounds of his new office. The creaking of steam pipes; deeper creaking as floorboards responded to shifting furniture; the ticking of the wall clock; through the closed door, the clacking of his secretary’s typing. And today, the ragged wheeze of Groves’s breathing. Those sounds continued uninterrupted, nobody volunteering an answer to the question hanging in the air.

Even though it was Oppie’s office, he wasn’t smoking, and nor were the others—not even Kitty. Fermi detested the habit, Groves disapproved of it, Feynman had kept his promise to his late wife that he’d quit, and Oppie had never seen Szilard with a pipe or cigarette. Still, Oppie could play with his accessories—frayed tobacco pouch, silver lighter, glass ashtray—and he did so, repeatedly rearranging their order on his desk. “Well,” he said at last, “as many as possible.”

“And how many is that?” snapped Groves. “Are we talking about saving billions, millions, thousands—or just one new Adam and one new Eve?”

Oppie looked at the swirling grain in his desktop, a vortex of tan and beige. He’d spent these last few years so concerned with how many could be killed, his mind was resisting switching gears to how many could be saved.

Robert had done cold-blooded calculus at Los Alamos, telling Fermi that an alternative plan, to poison the German food supply with radioactive fission products, would only be worth pursuing if it could guarantee half a million enemy dead. He’d been surprised at how easily that number had come to him—no dithering with a slide rule, no back-of-an-envelope figuring. It had popped out of his mouth, flat, uninflected, just one in a countless string of questions he’d had to answer every day.

Oppie had recently heard Groves shout down a college student who had sat out the war. “What about all the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” he’d demanded.

Groves had shot back, “I wish all of you who kept bringing that up could take a trip to Pearl Harbor, see the graves of all the American boys there. We shortened the war; we saved lives.”

And maybe they had—thousands or even tens of thousands of American troops that might otherwise have died during an invasion of Japan. But those numbers—the indisputably dead at both atomic targets versus the hypothetical Allied casualties who had lived instead—were paltry. A hundred-thousandth part, or so, of the planet’s population. Could they evacuate billions to Mars? If a man weighed 200 pounds, and you could somehow get even a ten-to-one ratio of rocket propellant to payload, you’d still need a ton of fuel per person—an inconceivable two billion tons to move everyone alive today.

Oppie found himself shaking his head and he brought a pair of fingers up to rub his forehead. Moving billions was out of the question. But millions? Surely they could do millions? He lifted his gaze, hoping to see optimism on the faces of the other scientists, but there was none. “I think,” he said at last, “that a statistically relevant population could be preserved.”

That vagueness loosened other tongues. “Thousands, certainly,” said Fermi, who was leaning against the door to the secretary’s office, even though there was an empty chair.

“Tens of thousands,” said Szilard, seated as far from Groves as possible. “Perhaps hundreds of thousands.”

Groves frowned deeply and looked like he was about to speak; Oppie had heard of his outburst in Chicago all those years ago about wedding caterers when Szilard had similarly mentioned a figure whose accuracy was within a factor of ten. “General,” said Oppie, “I know you want precision, but when one has no idea how you’re going to do something, it’s very difficult to try to come up with good numbers.”

Groves astonished him by nodding his jowly head vigorously. “Of course. Which is why I wanted to get this out on the table right at the beginning. You academic types can be so impractical—no offense. The reality is that we’ll almost certainly have to leave far, far more people behind than we’ll be able to rescue. Robert, I know this place is famous for its physicists, but I think you have some social scientists here, too, yes?”

“International selection criteria,” said Szilard. “I have some ideas. I attempted years ago to create an organization I called the Bund, and—”

“Good, good,” said Oppie before Groves came to a boil. “You can spearhead that, then.”

But Groves fixed his eyes on Leo. “And don’t forget that we have to keep everything secret,” he said. “Let people enjoy their lives; that’s fine. But if it gets out that we can only skim off the cream of humanity to save, there will be riots. Even if the solar purge is too far off to affect many of those currently alive, you can bet they’ll be fighting for their children or grandchildren to be selected.”

Oppie looked again at the faces around him. Szilard was a bachelor and Feynman, a widower for seven months now, was childless. But he and the others had kids.

Jesus, Robert. She has two perfectly good parents already. Why would you even ask such a thing?

And he couldn’t: neither Tyke nor Peter, at least not in any normal, human way. Daughter, son—it made no difference; he truly was not the attached kind. Not then, when death was the task, and not even now, when life was. Oh, he cared for them, after a fashion, but not in the way Teller clearly loved his already-born son Paul or the second child Szilard had said was on its way. He cared for Kitty, too, with what he supposed was a kind of love—a passionate rapport, even—but it was nothing compared to his feelings for Jean. He’d failed to kill Patrick Blackett, but Blackett had surely killed something within him, something that, through an unknowable necromancy, only Jean had ever managed to resuscitate.

Still, for dealing with vast anonymous death—death on the scale the super would afford—Teller was better suited than Oppie. But making decisions about individuals, about which people, or what sort of persons, might live and which, by being omitted from the list, would die, was something Oppie could do. He had a talent for choosing others’ futures, a knack born when he’d confronted the unbearability of a universe in which both he and Patrick Blackett—the spurned and the spurner—existed, a skill polished to a bright-red apple sheen on the mesa when he’d sought to give up his daughter for adoption.

“I’ll help you with that, Leo,” Oppie said. “And, yes, General, we’ll bring in some of the humanist-studies experts here—telling them it’s purely a hypothetical problem, of course.”

Szilard shook his head. “Another black day for mankind,” he said, looking at each person, even Groves, in turn. “The day upon which we decided to abandon most of our own kind to the flames.”